Annual Report 2022, KU Center for East Asian Studies

12
FACULTY
SPOTLIGHT
JIAKUN ZHANG
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, POLITICAL SCIENCE
Jiakun Zhang is an Assistant Professor
of Political Science whose position
was seeded by a CEAS Title VI grant in
2019. Dr. Zhang CEAS teaches courses
on international relations, Chinese
foreign policy, and U.S.-China relations.
His research focuses on the U.S-China
Trade War and the political economy of
trade and conflict in East Asia. In 2019,
he established the KU Trade War Lab
(TWL), which supports funded research,
offers student research training, and
facilitates outreach to other institutions
and the KU community on issues of
trade and conflict. Current TWL projects
focus on the U.S.-China trade war, but
its mission has expanded to include
a professional development speaker
series for students. This spring, two of his students won Undergraduate Research
Awards. It is no surprise that he won the 2021 K. Barbara Schowen Undergraduate
Research Mentor Award from the Center for Undergraduate Research.
His success in teaching is matched by his successful research agenda. Dr. Zhang
was selected to the 2021-22 cohort of the Wilson China Fellowship. This fellowship
is a non-residential fellowship by the Wilson Center created to help build
bridges between traditional academia and the policy world and to support a new
generation of American scholarship on China. His proposed project, "Multinational
Corporations and Economic Statecraft in U.S.-China Competition,” encompassed
all the KU Trade War Lab’s active projects. Dr. Zhang has written multiple articles
over the last year, and he fellowship policy report, "The U.S.-China Trade War and
the Tariff Weapon,” was released last semester.
Dr. Zhang also received $70,000 for a Minerva Defense Education and Civilian
Research University (DECUR) Partnership grant to work with collaborators at the
United States Air Force Academy, UCSD, and USC to explore conditions under
which economic coercion is most effective. His team at KU was responsible for